Posted
by
Soulskill
on Saturday February 01, 2014 @08:05PM
from the pork:-the-final-frontier dept.

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Phillip Swarts reports in the Washington Times that NASA is completing a $350 million rocket-engine testing tower at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi that it doesn't want and will never use. 'Because the Constellation Program was canceled in 2010, the A-3's unique testing capabilities will not be needed and the stand will be mothballed upon completion (PDF),, said NASA's inspector general. The A-3 testing tower will stand 300 feet and be able to withstand 1 million pounds of thrust (PDF). The massive steel structure is designed to test how rocket engines operate at altitudes of up to 100,000 feet by creating a vacuum within the testing chamber to simulate the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Although NASA does not expect to use the tower after construction, it's compelled by legislation from Sen. Roger F. Wicker (R-MS), who says the testing tower will help maintain the research center's place at the forefront of U.S. space exploration. 'Stennis Space Center is the nation's premier rocket engine testing facility,' says Wicker. 'It is a magnet for public and private research investment because of infrastructure projects like the A-3 test stand. In 2010, I authored an amendment to require the completion of that particular project, ensuring the Stennis facility is prepared for ever-changing technologies and demands.' Others disagree, calling the project the 'Tower of Pork' and noting that the unused structure will cost taxpayers $840,000 a year to maintain. 'Current federal spending trends are not sustainable, and if NASA can make a relatively painless contribution to deficit reduction by shutting down an unwanted program, why not let it happen?' says Pete Sepp, executive vice president of the National Taxpayers Union. 'It's not rocket science, at least fiscally.'"

It's a pretty big part of what MS does. Measured as a percentage of GSP (the state-level version of GDP), Mississippi is the 4th-largest net recipient of transfers from other states, which equal about 20% of the state's economy. The only three larger are South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida (a whopping 50% of Florida's economy consists of net transfers).

Just curious does that number include SS payments to individuals? For the sake of argument if it does SS is national program after all, and Florida tends to have lots of retirees relocating to it.

Sure they have adopted some policies that make it more favorable for that demographic but that is because the retirees were already there to vote for them; so it might be less fair to tar Florida with the same "hand in the federal cookie jar" brush as MS, and SC.

It's a pretty big part of what MS does. Measured as a percentage of GSP (the state-level version of GDP), Mississippi is the 4th-largest net recipient of transfers from other states, which equal about 20% of the state's economy. The only three larger are South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida (a whopping 50% of Florida's economy consists of net transfers).

Well isn't that the problem?
State governments whore to the federal government. That is, they give their power to the federal government for the federal governments money.States can't print their own money, but the federal gov't can. Since states compete to have low taxes and provide the most services, they have every incentive to give up as much of their own power as it can.

Thus the rise of Federal power and the loss of state power. To rebalance power to States, an amendment to the constitution allowing

Well I am fine with giving the state money from the federal coffers to help the needy out. However building a 300ft tall penis\H\H\H\H\H\H tower that nobody is going to use is not going to help the plight of the poor in any way.

Republicans rail against government waste and against welfare... unless it is getting directed into their pockets.

Well I am fine with giving the state money from the federal coffers to help the needy out. However building a 300ft tall penis\H\H\H\H\H\H tower that nobody is going to use is not going to help the plight of the poor in any way.

He's a Republican. If he gave money to the poor, who would it trickle down to?

An ideology of hating the poor and worshipping the rich ubermenschen tends to lead to some amounts of cognitive dissonance and accompanying weird decisions when your home state counts amongst the former.

My view of trickle-down economics is that it's better described as tinkle-down economics: It's just dandy for those who are on top and don't care about anyone else, but the rest of us just get pissed on.

Those rich greedy fucks caused this economic disaster. In part by allowing mortgaged securities in the first place, and then progressively playing with it like it was the Wild West. This is 100% the fault of Wall Street, and they need to be brought to justice. Even if it's in the form of the guillotines and French mobs.

It's a myth that the "job creators" are the rich people, and that money "trickles" down in this economy.

Yet, most of the money doesn't get to stay in pocket. The tower-tester thing actually has to be built. So most of that money is going to wages of construction workers, a good many of whom are black, if that helps. The few crappy low paying jobs they quit to take these 2 year construction gigs now have to raise wages to get decent replacements. Eventually, somebody who couldn't find work before, is now working.

So it does somewhat help the plight of the poor; a good amount while while under construction, some

Why not spend the same $350 million to hire the workers directly to dig ditches and fill them in, or break rocks? (Or how about repairing crumbling bridges and other infrastructure that is actually useful, for christ's sake.) In effect, that's what you are doing. Building single-purpose infrastructure that isn't going to be used. The only difference is that you are paying wealthy contractors a 20% premium to subcontract out the work to less wealthy subcontractors, who take 15% and to subcontract out the work to the guys who actually do the work.

The only reason you do it this way is that those wealthy contractors kick-back some of their cut into the Senator's reelection PACs. Whereas if you directly hired $350m worth of workers, they wouldn't give the Senator anything.

So why can't we get programs like the CCC and WPA back? They were a great investment. They put hundreds of thousands of people to work during the Great Depression, and the works projects they built back then are still being enjoyed by people today. Hard work is not welfare, but the money is equally wasted if it's poured into useless rocket motor testing towers.

The article you link to doesn't say the figures are incorrect, it merely whines that liberals are inaccurately characterizing states like most of those in the North East as "Blue states", and states in the South as "Red States". The basis of his complaint is that many of the states in the Red or Blue columns seem to kinda sorta vote the opposite way in congressional elections, which might sound sensible except he's not using aggregate figures, but simply numbers of representatives elected, which means his figures don't consider the gerrymandering - intentional and natural - that means # reps rarely represents % support.

He also complains that local party support also dismisses the complaint, arguing that, for example, New Jersey is a "red" state because it has a Republican governor. This makes little sense - local parties and local party candidates reflect the extremes within a particular state, you can't compare a Republican governor in New Jersey to one in Alabama.

It's a bad argument and he should feel bad. Liberals are right to use Presidential candidates as the basic shorthand. It's the one case where the majorities in each state can be determined, and where the same point of view is on display and voted upon in each state.

I think states like Mississippi are perfect examples of this hypocrisy about pork spending just like with the Lockheed F35 boondoggle costing over 1 trillion dollars because they employ workers in Georgia.

I have several friends that work at General Dynamics here in Metro Detroit and the government spending has them in a quandary: they are forced by politicians to create a bill as high as possible - mandatory junkets and overtime, even when there's nothing to do. "Research" projects are the only thing that they do and they just post youtube videos, cancel the project and start something new. None of them can quit, even though the economy has recovered, because they are being paid so well as a result of the requirement to bill taxpayers so much.

Does anyone know why the Republicans came right to the table on the sequester this time around? Because offense spending (thinly veiled as "defense" spending) was to be rolled back to 2003 levels. That is absolutely evil if you are a member of the Republicans.

Does anyone know why the Republicans came right to the table on the sequester this time around? Because offense spending (thinly veiled as "defense" spending) was to be rolled back to 2003 levels. That is absolutely evil if you are a member of the Republicans.

Both parties love wasting tax dollars on useless things on a massive scale. Republicans pay lip service to small government but fail to deliver; Democrats swear and complain about big corporations and bankers but then use legislation for economic stimulation, job creation, and consumer protection to shove even more money in the hands of the groups the claim to hate. Both are "absolutely evil". Pick your poison.

It's funny that the area hasn't voted blue since the 40s. I've worked in the industry for 37 years, and never once heard of such a thing as any contractor being "forced by politicians to create a bill as high as possible". That's the kind of thing that you can't simply hide under the rug...there are too many audits, and too many potential whistle blowers. So, until someone shows some evidence, this is nothing but tin-foil hat conspiracy theory.

Difference being that Palin was a national candidate, whereas Senator Wicker likely has no ambitions beyond his current position. Robbing the nation to provide pork to your constituents back home plays much better when those constituents are the only ones with a say in whether or not you keep your job.

I realize we have to flog Sarah Palin at every opportunity we get, but If you are talking Washington politics, which is where the money for those bridges was to come from, the "bridge to nowhere" was the baby of Ted Stevens and Don Young, not Sarah Palin. Sara Palin was a state official, not a member of Congress that had a hand in the funding.

The article acts as if they are wasting $350 million by completing it. But it does not say how much has been spent already. Maybe there is not that much money to save by cancelling it?
And I can't believe that the NASA will not use it in the future, the article also gives no real reason for that.

[In 2010] NASA already had spent $292 million on the A-3 structure. Since then, it's spent an additional $57 million to keep building it, according to a February 2013 report by the agency's inspector general, Paul Martin

Don't forget the $1.2 billion spent on the J-2X Constellation upper-stage rocket-engine which will also be cancelled as soon as it is developed. And which was the only reason for the A-3 test stand being built in the first place.

(Stennis has other more general purpose test stands, some of which go back to before the Apollo program. The A-3 was a specialised single-purpose stand for one specific test of the J-2X. Essentially it simulates the ignition for a single specific sized engine at a single specific al

"It is important that a large emphasis be placed on safety and testing, and we cannot launch any type of vehicle until we test it extensively using NASA's best tools for testing," Cochran said after a 2011 hearing on the agency's budget.

How did the Saturn V ever get off the ground without such a rigorous test infrastructure as this?

It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1985, which is really too bad since it in no longer much use to any modern space programs, and sits unused and badly rusting. The could tear it down, but will not be able to until it starts falling apart itself.

How do you figure? The money itself has no real value. The real value is in the time, effort and resources that have been directed through the use of that money. If that effort has been spent on useless things, then it also has not been spent on useful things.

I wouldn't trust them to properly differentiate between a scientific boondoggle and useful scientific research.Maybe this facility is useless, maybe it's not. But the NTU doesn't share an agenda with those who would fund a program of basic reasearch in this country.

By who? This isn't a railway. I can count on one hand the number of companies in the private sector who could make use of these, and none of them work with anything similar to what this test rig was made for.

Yeah maybe it'll get used once or twice, but will it pass cost benefit? Hell no.

There is very little basic research in a rocket launching pad unless it likely to be used for space exploration, which evidently this boondoggle is not, which is why NASA has been trying to kill it for years now but MS politicians keep preventing US taxpayers from saving money. (and Yes, I live in MIssissippi).

this is a neo-con, so the house of neo-cons/tea* is backing it. Personally, I am fine with this because SpaceX WILL be using it.
The real pork are things like SLS and manufacturing of more M1A2s. And just the SLS is 3-5B PER YEAR.
So ppl pissing about 350 million while ignoring the neo-cons/tea* push on the SLS and M1A2s is a joke.

Sure he can. Here's how: Put a hold on all legislation going through his committee. Any senator can do this, and the effect is to gum up the works so much that the rest of the Senate can either do as the one senator asks, or not be able to engage in any legislative activity at all that relates to whatever committee he's on. The other senators will likely decide that it's easier to fund his pork project than to deal with the hold.

You tella car company that you're going to pay them a half million dollars for a special custom car. You sign the contract, which requires that you pay them $500000 and that they give you a car when it's completed. Halfway through the process you suddenly decide that you don't want the car after all.

Well, tough. You already signed the contract and they're already building the car. You have no choice but to pay for a car that you aren't going to use.

That's what goes on in vases like this. The government signed the contract saying that they'll pay. They can't renege on the deal just because they decided they didn't want what they were paying for any more, so instead they have to pay for it and let it gather dust once they have it. I can guarantee that if you or I signed a contract that said we'd pay for something we wouldn't be able to get out of it just because we no longer wanted what we were paying for.

This isn't so much about grandstanding politicians that want money for useless programs, but about grandstanding politicians who like to decide the government doesn't want something for which the contract has already been signed.

At least any I've come across. Yes, the Gov't has to pay for work already performed, but it's a recognized fact that one Congress can't bind future ones to financial deals, and money to finish a particular contract may never arrive.

So by and large, as someone else pointed out, the Government has a clause in contracts allowing it to terminate the contract for convenience.

and the bureaucracy for getting reimbursed for anything is crazy enough that sometimes I just take the loss (getting parts from Digikey, etc).
And this is where the money goes?!? I dig doing my little bit to help the space program, but this is frustrating.

Don't get me wrong. I want NASA spending that money on something useful, not a 'tower to nowhere'. I do kind of relate to the senators too. Jobs shouldn't be temporary. I know, a lot of younger people think they are.It can be nice to regularly change things up for a while. Eventually one has to grow out of that. Staying in place is what gets you benefit time, raises, etc... It used to be how one gets a pension too back when they had those. I save a lot in my 401k but I don't see how I am ever going to retire!

This stuff becomes important when one goes to have a family. Even without the family, one day hopefully we all realize that we need to work to live, not live to work. Stay and build up that vacation time!

NASA projects unfortunately aren't stable enough for this kind of life. The problem is every politician has to go and cancel whatever the one before had NASA doing and build their own legacy. Of course they actually have no legacy because the next one will just cancel it anyway but I guess they all expect the next guy to be better than themselves... Meanwhile jobs are created and destroyed. Workers are hired and layed off. At least these porky senators are helping workers have a reason to want to work for NASA. Any organization that wants to do great things like space exploration is going to need to attract the best people. Why would they go to a place that will lay them off every time the whitehouse changes it's curtains?

Of course, a tower to nowhere is still a stupid way to spend taxpayer's money. The real problem isn't the pork, it's the politicians that keep changing the goals!!!

The Ghosts of Jamie Whitten and John Stennis live on in Mississippi. Bringing federal dollars to pork barrel projects.

Jamie Whitten was the ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee and any appropriations bill that passed by had to have something for Mississippi. Stennis was the same way in the Senate and together they always got something for Mississippi it seems in every appropriations bill.That was true when the Advanced Solid Rocket Motor [google.com] was mandated by Congress after the Challenger incident. NASA didn't want it but if they wanted to fund the shuttle and other programs, they had to take the ASRM too. Things like having to deliver the ASRM rockets on barges were put into bid contracts to prevent Thiokol (the supplier of RSRM engines for the shuttle) from bidding on the contract. Oh, they just happened to have the site at Iuka MS, which among being the site of a defunct Nuclear Reactor project by the TVA [wikipedia.org] and was also a former weapons depot.

You see that's the problem with the seniority system in Congress, you can get politicians re-elected by people and they just move up the ladder on all these committees and it's the committees where all the power is in Congress. You can't just put legislation on the floor of either the House or Senate, it has to go through Committee first and if you have ranking congressmen and senators blocking projects until they get what they want, then important legislation can be held up indefinitely. It's been that way since our Federal Government was formed and handcuffs well meaning legislation with bad things that garner support from fringe members of Congress to get the votes necessary to pass the whole package.

Even though everybody thinks that Earmarks are supposedly a thing of the past [nymag.com], they're still around. The testing facility in MS shows again that port barrel spending is alive and well and a lot of things still get through, for example with the recent budget deal. [washingtontimes.com] Did you also know we have a STARBASE [dodstarbase.org] program as well? Well in 2012 it received $5m [cagw.org] in funding and while most won't consider it a lot, it's really a glorified recruiting program.

Also, it is a fallacy to think that taxes fund expenditures at the Federal level, since the federal government has a fiat currency, It can always pay its debts, not withstanding the limits of inflation).

As a matter of rule, the U.S. can always pay back its debts by printing enough money to cover that debt. What that action would do to inflation is another thing altogether.

I got distracted when I posted the previous post. I meant to say that taxes don't actually fund expenditures since the government can print money to pay for any expenditures it authorizes.

So what are taxes for? 1) If you have to pay taxes in dollars, then you better have some dollars. Taxes help ensure that a government's currency is used by its citizens. 2) Taxes can control inflation by destroying money (i.e. taking it out of the economy) 3) to implement policies (e.g. redistribution)

The government's ability to repay debts is mainly based on its power to tax to raise the funds. Governments that rely on printing currency to repay debts or for general spending tend to end up in the history books (Weimar Republic) or the newspapers (Zimbabwe) as economic basket cases crippled by hyperinflation.

He isn't proposing operating the government taxless. He's saying they don't need those taxes to pay for anything, the function of taxes is not to allow spending, taxes are not "income" or "revenue" for the government. Taxes merely destroy currency in the economy. Spending creates it. There doesn't need to be a 1:1 balance between the two, with any difference made up by borrowing. Governments only need to balance the two effects to match an increasing supply of currency to the actual requirements of the grow

I don't actually like MMT, but it is an accurate depiction of reality.

The implications of MMT are very unsettling if you've grown up with a classical view of economics.

Keynesians are discredited and irrelevant. They have no basis for their objections because they were never coherent to begin with. Keynesians have consistently failed to predict economic events or why their policies don't have the intended effects.

MMT isn't something you can understand in a few minutes. You can hear the basic arguments in

Henry Ford paid his workers $5/day in the 1920s. About $0.62 per hour. The value of gold at the time was about $20/oz.

Gold is currently valued at about $1200/oz. So if you think gold represents an intrinsic non-inflationary value, as goldbugs do, then the "inflation corrected" equivalent of Ford's $5/day is $37.50/hr.

(Likewise, the median weekly wage in 1925 was about $25/week. So a gold-equivalent of $1500/week today. The actual median wage today is $510, and the median houshold income is about $860)

Either you are not looking very hard, or you are basement dweller raiding your parents fridge. Seriously if you actually track what your spending on groceries, gasoline, clothing, and healthcare; I would be STUNNED if you still claim there is deflation.

The only deflation out there in recent years has been in heating costs (for folks using nat gas) and electricity in some areas. Housing had its big gaps down in 2008-2010, but has pretty well been inflating if slowly since that time. I don't rent but friends tell me rents have gone way up everywhere and its keeping them in their current apartments.

There has been no deflation in the things 99%ers spend their money on other than housing. I don't care what the FED claims; because their numbers are fucking retarded, I don't buy a new TV every week, I sure as hell do buy bread and gasoline though.

We can use the vacuum test chamber to see how Time Warner Cable executives breathe at 100,000 feet altitude, film it and charge $1 pay per view. I'm thinking recovery of the 350 million won't take long.

I sure would but you have to cross that personal security barrier first! People need to have a ce thousand in the bank so they can write a check to get furnace replaced in February when it fails. Only then can they start putting their extra savings into investments. It's easy for me and likely you to forget just how hard putting away even a few grand is for lots of people.

Protip: decreased inflation != deflation. Intro to calculus would have taught you that much. The article you linked to mentioned fears about deflation, but no actual deflation. Being afraid of something doesn't make it manifest.

So basically your own source, were you to deem it credible, would serve to show that even the EU is still experiencing inflation.

It not only shows the real statistics (based upon the formulas that were in use in 1980 and earlier), but explains what sort of manipulation has been going on with the CPI, why it is a bad thing, and why your claimed source with the NY Times is full of the proverbial BS.

If you want to see not only the actual stats for what inflation has been going on, note that inflation in America has been hovering around about 10% annual on most goods. See also this site: http://www.shadowstats.com/ [shadowstats.com]

That would mean that prices have quadrupled since 2000: are rent, houses, gasoline, food, cell phones, jeans four times as expensive as in 2000? Of course not. Many of those things have actually gotten cheaper.

Inflation and CPI aren't particularly well-defined numbers, so people can legitimat

A quadrupling of price is not a 400% increase. It's the original price, plus 300%. Also, it would take much less than 40 years. "Simple math" doesn't include compounding. Someone please correct this if I'm wrong, but I believe the actual answer would be a bit over 14 years via the Rule of 72.

What drugs are you smoking? because I really need some of that delusional crack you are smoking.

Deflation? every dollar I have is worth less every single day, only someone that had been hit in the head over and over and over again with a sack of nickles would think that my money is growing in value. Inflation is at double digits the economists are so corrupt that they now have a very narrow measurement to manipulated the outcome.

I work for Lockheed-Martin (I work for a completely different program that is within budget) and I can say that we have to keep the Gov. from changing the rules to the game every few seconds. It is like playing "calvin-ball" with calvin (of calvin and hobbs). They come up with an idea, and all of the sudden another part must be added to keep another senator/representative happy (jobs in his/her state). If we could stick to ONE design for any true length of time we could be ahead of the game, but not when the rules get changed ALL THE FREAKING TIME.

I work for Lockheed-Martin (I work for a completely different program that is within budget) and I can say that we have to keep the Gov. from changing the rules to the game every few seconds. It is like playing "calvin-ball" with calvin (of calvin and hobbs). They come up with an idea, and all of the sudden another part must be added to keep another senator/representative happy (jobs in his/her state). If we could stick to ONE design for any true length of time we could be ahead of the game, but not when the rules get changed ALL THE FREAKING TIME.

And why do you think this is? Do you not think it benefits Lockheed-Martin? Every time a requirement is changed and the contracts are re-written there is an opportunity to pack on some more lard. And do you think it is an accident or "neutral business planning decision" that the major aerospace contractors have subsidiaries and major suppliers in pretty much every state? Every time an unnecessary carbuncle is added to a project to satisfy a senator, the contractor has an opportunity to renegotiate costs, and also gains another ally who will not want to see the project die, no matter how irrelevant it becomes to the nation's needs. In some ways it's like bribery, except the cash is flowing in the opposite direction to normal...

Sure it might be irritating to an outcome-focussed engineering type who wants to work on technically successful projects, but from management's perspective a politically unkillable project that meanders on for decades, neither finishing or being allowed to fail, can be a far lower career risk.

I used to work on the government side of things, and this was a political requirement. Congress insists on individually approving annual funding for any program over a certain value. If a program was to be funded, we had to ensure that there were significant subcontractors in every relevant political district. This made no engineering sense, it raised costs immensely, and it made us all want to declare open season on Congresscritters (no bag limit).

It's the system. It needs changed, but the very people to change it (Congress) are the primary beneficiaries. It's nothing more or less than corruption: one of the reasons that being elected to Congress is the same as being elected to the millionaire's club.

It is hard to re-purpose it. The best thing to do would be to stop and preserve it the way it is or finish key parts that are already paid for or nearly complete. The only people who might use it would be SPACEX but considering the location that is not too likely. SPACEX would need to change enough stuff around that the work should be halted until there is a known need.

Agreed. In this case I think NASA may be the short sighted one. "Maintaining capability" is something that has value, even when it's not used. I had a knee jerk reaction when I read the headline, but upon contemplating, I find myself agreeing with the senator who's getting the pork. Sometimes wrong people do the right things for the wrong reasons.

Didn't they lease or sell one recently to SpaceX or one of the other private companies? Sounds like the money was already allocated as well, so what's the damage?

The damage is the cost of completing the tower (so far unspent monies) and the $840,000/year maintenance fee. Fuck that the money was already allocated bull shit. If it's not needed and won't be used, reallocate the remaining funds somewhere (preferably within NASA, since that's where the money was really allocated) it won't be nothing but waste.
This "allocated funds need to go where they were allocated no matter what the current situation" and "spend it or lose" it crap is responsible for so much waste

Well, if the allocated money doesn't go where it was allocated for, then it shouldn't go anywhere.

That is a problem I see with some people. They think there is some entitlement that if you don't spend X on something, you can spend the rest on something else. Well, not, because the funding wasn't approved or allocated on something else. It would be like you using your corporate credit card to purchase window treatments for you car because they cancelled that trip to a meeting 3 states away. If they do not sp

It is designed for large 1 million lb VACUUM based thrust (IOW, an upper stage engine(s)). What is nice is that the raptor is a large upper stage engine. I expect that SpaceX will use this for their raptor engine. The E-3 stand will only work for sub-components testing, not the full engine.